Dahyun sat next to Tzuyu and Mina for dinner. The dishes that were laid out included fried rice, fried chicken, lasagne—a food she was grateful she knew—and some dish with a lot of cheese on it. 

“What is that?” She pointed at it. 

“Macaroni and cheese,” Mina said, “from America. The Northern part.”

“So you have foods from Asia, Europe, and America,” she began, “where else have you lived?”

“Once we were finally all together,” Nayeon smiled, “we tried just about everywhere, even Antarctica.”

“Which was the first time we ever saw the animals there!” Mina grinned. “Not like nowadays where the zoos hold them.” Her expression turned sombre. 

Tzuyu leaned over and, in a loud whisper, said, “Mina went through a phase where she tried to bring the penguins back to their home.” 

“We lost sight of her for several months,” Jeongyeon laughed. “It’s great she didn’t do that in the year of social media, or else she would have been known as the penguin thief.”

“It wasn’t just penguins,” the person in question grumbled. “And the transports for them were terrible. The rest of you would have all done the same.” 

“What is a zoo?” Dahyun asked. “I’ve seen penguins. Wonderful creatures. They share a lot of care between one another. Have to as well.”

“A zoo is like a museum, but for living animals.” 

Her stomach tightened. “They’re being held there?” She had seen pet cages, but Jihyo had assured her that they were let out. Now she envisioned the animals in large cages, separated from their homes. She took one deep breath. That was what she needed. Not thoughts of darkness, months of emptiness. Cold flooded her limbs. A hand closed around her own. Two. She looked up. All were looking at her, each with warm gazes, but she felt their concern, as well as their sadness. 

“So you went to the South Pole?” Sana asked gently. 

Dahyun nodded. “Yes. North as well. We explored first, but then stayed with the elves there. It was too cold, even for us. Their magic had adapted to that, but that was not the case for our own.”

“So they were snow elves?” Chaeyoung’s interest soared. 

She thought of the word in their language. “We call them Drasa.” Wracking her brain for the translation. “Those from the ice?” she suggested. “Though in your language, snow elves sounds better.” 

“What languages do you speak?” Momo asked. “Any others beside English, Korean, and that of the fae?”

“Those three,” she nodded, “as well as that of the Drasa, Crosa—wood elves, that includes the five main tribes and two of the splinter ones. They each have similar roots, but are considered different languages.” It was then that she realised her years had paid off. She also wanted to show them how wonderful the differences between them were. “And three of the Arcsa—the sea elves.” 

It was quiet. She felt their surprise, saw it in their faces as well. Even awe. It warmed her face. 

“I had a lot of time to learn.” And reason to, which she’d explain if they’d ask. 

Sana smiled. It was genuine. Dahyun found it beautiful. 

“No time for Japanese?” 

“Not at the time, no. Many thought I’d spent too much time with learning other languages.” 

“Not all of you learned that much?”

She couldn’t help but smile. “I might have gone overboard with the languages. We only really needed to know one or two for the Crosa, as well as English, but when the time came to teach them, I had the seven elvish languages, as well as the ‘main’ human one.” There were other languages that were comparable to how widespread English was, but the human languages had been the last ones she’d learned. 

Tzuyu tilted her head at that. “They didn’t learn it themselves?”

“It maximised efficiency. I went into the human world for a short amount of time to learn some of it that way.” 

“Is that why you came here then?” Sana asked. 

“Yes.” She remembered one of the few sightings of the fae. Not only did they know that her brother had been bitten by a vampire, but they had also heard of the second time she’d been there. They didn’t know that this fae had also been her. “Because it wasn’t for very long, I might have taken some of their texts to help” 

“You stole from humans?” Jeongyeon’s eyebrows rose. There was a smile playing on her lips. 

“We sent them back!” Dahyun protested. “Although I’m not sure if it counted as returning them. It was about half a century later.”

They laughed. “You’re right. That doesn’t count,” Chaeyoung said. “What books were they?”

“Philosophical texts mostly, as well as the main religious text of the reason. Thankfully, not in Latin, though I had come across texts like that.” 

“Really light reading, then.” Momo smiled. 

Dessert was then ready. 

“You were right,” she whispered to Mina, “these are better.” 

She grinned. “Glad you think so.” 

Then her eye caught on the kitchen counter. She could feel the sadness still lying there. It had drawn on the other forms of sadness. That of the girls. Directed at Dahyun. She felt guilty to have caused it, but she would be the cause of much more than that soon. 

She stopped eating. Her appetite had returned to its baseline these past weeks, but that was still small, compared to that of vampires, even that of humans. 

“If it is alright with you, I would like to start with this.” She brought the shards towards her, the cloth over them falling away. “Theoretically, I could do more, but I think it best if I do two at a time.”

They nodded, but Dahyun didn’t miss the hesitance. It wasn’t towards the shards, but rather coupled with worry and directed at her. They suspected something was off there. They weren’t wrong to, but she would have to convince them that they were. 

“I may not have ever done this with sadness, but I laced a mind with calm before.” Those emotions no longer came her way, but she would not tell them that. “Her mind was,” she trailed off, “greatly changed after she’d returned from a group of mental fae. She could not function normally, as emotions of discomfort and nervousness tugged on fear. It caused her to go deeper into the emotional world whenever they arose. She’d lose days to those episodes.”

“How’d she get back?” Jihyo asked. 

“We gave her calm and took the discomfort. There was one moment where I brought out some of my deeper calm. It was far more effective than the ‘normal’ form of it.” 

“So you made the net,” Sana said. “Did that tie your minds or emotions together?” 

The question was good. Dahyun would have normally answered it with great enthusiasm. These were the sort of conversations she adored having. They weren’t for today. Or any subsequent day here. 

“At first, yes,” she admitted. “I felt echoes whenever it would have normally flared. Nothing more.” That was a lie. “But I found a way to separate those ties. It involved making them physical and tying in more of the other person’s emotions. That’s why the sadness has laid there for so long.” It was a wonderful explanation—one she wished could work. Yet it didn’t. It was just another falsehood. Sana’s words echoed in her head. 

Just don’t lie to me. 

“I hadn’t had an order in mind,” another lie, “but Jihyo’s and Momo’s were the first I made. Each with a few threads of emotion I’d drawn upon in this house.” Yet another lie. It twisted her stomach two times over. She supposed the immorality there was alright, given that her leaving was worse. The potential consequences if she did none of this were far worse as well. 

“Sure.” The two nodded. “How do we do this,” Momo smiled lightly, “close our eyes?”

“We can watch a film actually. Or,” she caught herself, “you can. I may be busy for most of it—all of it.” She pulled the two shards ‘marked’ as theirs closer to her. 

“Then you’re getting comfortable,” Nayeon said. “Your turn on the sofa.”

“The floor is fine,” she said as they all stood. “This sort of thing doesn’t require a comfortable position.”  Not quite true either. There were many times when she had returned to the physical world with a terrible ache in her neck, but that had passed. One such time had been recently in the forest. 

“Maybe you don’t need it,” Jeongyeon said. “But you’ll be happy about it. Get on there.” 

Two hands went to her shoulders, pushing her lightly towards the piece of furniture. The grip was light, but strong enough that she knew protesting would not help her much. It was Sana. 

Her guilt increased then. She still felt warm from the library. There had been such strong surges of green and purple, both from herself and Sana. So much of her yearned to let that flourish, but it was a selfish wish of hers. 

They sat. Sana drew up her knees, tucking her feet below her legs. She was leaning close to her. Dahyun could still smell the remnants of her floral perfume. Two things held her back from moving closer: she knew she shouldn’t and she did not know how. That was quite possibly a good thing. She had an understanding of emotions and a loose grasp of words. Both were far better than before, but she was still so ignorant about actions. 

Proximity and touch were key factors in this sort of love. That she was unaware of how to go about them might help in avoiding the strengthening of those emotions. She didn’t know. What she did know was that she wanted to close the distance between her and Sana, but also that she shouldn’t—couldn’t. 

That was when she felt the emotions from Momo. They were directed at her. She sensed a rising longing, one tinged with sadness. There was no jealousy, however. Only dark blue and purple. Then it disappeared behind something terribly similar to shame, as well as happiness—meant for both Sana and Dahyun. The sequence of emotions was perplexing. She wanted to understand it, to know why there was a different sort of sadness as a result of Dahyun. Yet there was no time, and there were other things needing to be done now. 

“You can still reconsider,” she said instead, bringing the shards to hover in front of both girls.

Both shook their heads. 

“You might feel cold and saddened in the beginning. It will fade.”

“How do you know?” Sana asked. Her gaze felt more intense than normal. 

“I tried it.” She closed her eyes, hoping that would help against the warmth in her chest, as well as the slight ticklish sensation. It was all so strange. 

Finding Momo and Jihyo in the emotional world was easy. She pushed the sadness away from the physical world and made it expand into tiny spindles. In the distance, she heard the low tunes of the TV and could smell the leftover scents of dinner. It was safe. She let herself sink into the emotional world. Fully. 

The first thing she needed to do was loop the sadness around their core emotions. She could not risk those being altered if the fae ever came here. Then she wound it through the emotions surrounding Momo’s pink and Jihyo’s orange. These were love and happiness. She didn’t let herself regard them for too long. She did not want to know to whom the different forms belonged to—especially if one of them was directed at her. 

Instead, she proceeded to cast the net of blue around the entirety of their emotions. She felt it draw upon the foreign fear in both, though Momo’s was stronger. The ice from that spread through Dahyun's mind, but she forced it to remain in the emotional world and pulled her own sadness to the forefront. If her eyes were open, they would still be blue. 

The last thing to take care of was the sadness within both—that which they had accumulated during their immortality. She bound the remaining strands to the periphery and felt how some of their sadness seeped into her mind. These were the echoes of the knowledge that they would lose their families to time, the threads that joined with the guilt that followed killing a person for food, and the thrum of loneliness that had arisen during their long years. That loneliness wasn’t great, but it was attached to flickers of love, desire, and happiness—a loneliness that came from not having someone to love—or someone who loved you. It created a dull ache in Dahyun, a familiar one. She saw a sadness that came when one either lost a love or could not pursue it. 

With that, Dahyun was finished. Purple was blossoming around her. It came from different people, but the strongest was from the person closest to her. She also felt how the warmth expanded into her mind, but gradually. It was a passive motion. 

She released the grip she had on the blue and withdrew from the emotional world. 

Her face was damp with tears. A tissue was being wiped across her cheek. She had to blink the blurriness away. 

“How do the two of you feel?” Her voice sounded thick. 

“You were right,” Momo said. “At first sad, but then okay.”

“I don’t feel very